 I've been a regular at every SOMESSO event so far, and Lee Bryant kindly invited me to the latest incarnation last Thursday - a joint SOMESSO and Headshift one day Social Business Summit. Sorting out a very embarrassing attack of the ave.exe virus delayed me enough that morning to miss the two keynotes from Jeff Dachis and JP Rangaswami (my Mac friends tell me I should make the switch, but I'm stubbornly staying on Windows along with 90% of my customers). I was particularly disappointed missing JP, as everyone told me his session was excellent, breaking the way ahead with the social business topic down to transaction cost. As soon as the video of his session is available, I'll update this post to include it.  The social business theme is dear to my heart. The word social and the social media term can be counter productive when talking to some business leaders about the way businesses needs to change in the 21st century. This summit meeting was all about applying what I would call enterprise 2.0 and some would call social tools (blogs, wikis, micro-blogging, tagging and other collaboration tools) to help businesses be more ...
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A few months back on the 19th of November 2009 NESTA, as part of their Silicon Valley comes to the UK sequence of events, televised a discussion called " Social Media: A Force for Good?". The panel was our very own national treasure, actor, QI master and twitterphile Stephen Fry, Biz Stone the Founder and Chief Executive of Twitter, and Reid Hoffman the Founder and Chief Executive of LinkedIn (you can see what they said below). The proceedings were moderated by NESTA's own Chief Executive Jonathan Kestenbaum, and in his introduction he said: "It feels like there was never a world before Twitter"
Well 4 years ago today, this was the first ever tweet from Jack Dorsey (via Mashable): As Biz Stone alludes to in the NESTA session, the idea of using some form of SMS messaging between groups came out of a brainstorming session while they were all working on something else that was going so well for ODEO. At first they dropped the vowels from the name in common with a trend for web 2.0 services started by Flickr. Today four years ago was when they started testing....
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 I posted the other day on the multiplicity of Cloud definitions, and whether I thought the term itself is useful, or all hype. Up in the North East, Adrian Pearson picked up on it and related to a story of being sold some telecoms technology with a cloud diagram and so concluded: "David’s article reminded me that there is real practical benefit in being able to use a term like “Cloud”; to allow everyone in the discussion to make a mental note to accept that bit of the explanation as a “no need to go there” and concentrate on the more important stuff."
Dennis seemed to like the post too, and admired my honesty over admitting falling in to the jargon trap. He followed that up this week with " Struggling with understanding the cloud?" picking up on some great satire and sarcasm on the definition thing. Well, that reminded me of Larry Ellison's rant on the topic from last September. He was at the Churchill Club, a kind of Silicon Valley insiders thing, talking to Ed Zander, when he went off the deep end, around exactly the same issues, saying: "Cloud Computing is not only the future of computing, it is the present and the entire past of computing, is ...
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 Here's news of a special offer for readers of Business Two Zero. I've always supported SOMESSO events since speaking at their first one in Zurich back in 2008. SOMESSO stands for social media espresso - it's a strong, fast hit of social media for the corporate world. Every event so far has had top notch speakers and impressive companies and practitioners in the audience, resulting in some great discussions and conversations. Their next event is in London next week on Thursday, March 18, organized in conjunction with my friends at Headshift (now part of the Dachis Group). This one is positioned as a one day Social Business Summit, and even the title will spark some discussion. Jeff Dachis will speak on how far we've come, and the impact of social tools in business to date. My friend JP Rangaswami will then talk about where we are going, and how the socially-calibrated business of the future might operate. The rest of the day will involve more discussion on where we might be headed, along with case studies on use of social media for collaboration internally, externally for marketing, support and connecting to the ecosystem. ...
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 Last Wednesday evening, 3rd March, London Wiki Wednesdays got rebooted for 2010 and beyond, with a varied selection of great 5 minute presentations and me doing MC duty as usual. We were hosted by Alek Lotoczko and our friends at NYK. Actually, it felt like the old days. As you can see from our wiki, there was a bit of a hiatus between November 2008 and October 2009 and then to this month, excluding several informal meetings down the pub. The key issue has been the time and energy it takes to get venues and sponsors (anyone interested, please see me afterwards). However, we've decided to get things moving with a full meeting every two months (on the first Wednesday of the month) with informal meetings in between. During my intro the group agreed to broaden the topic out from just wiki related projects, to wiki plus all things enterprise 2.0 - social media tools applied to business. We will, however, retain our London Wiki Wednesday branding, rather than changing to 2.0 Tuesdays or some such. Somewhere in the handovers I also mentioned the 2.0 Adoption Council and 2.0 Adoption Community. On the night ...
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 There are changes underway across the worlds of social media marketing, social media applied inside business (what some people would call enterprise 2.0) and where these tools connect (or not) to the business processes in ( Cloud based) CRM and ERP systems. Products like Salesforce are adding Chatter, and Twitter connectivity. Enterprise 2.0 tools that started as wikis or forums are adding micro-blogging along with more and more social functionality. Content Management Systems are adding or acquiring a social dimension. Marketing departments are struggling with, or looking for tools to help with, brand reputation monitoring and management. One significant segment of this change just got much clearer with Altimeter Group's R “Ray” Wang and Jeremiah Owyang producing Social CRM: The New Rules of Relationship Management. R told the Enterprise Irregulars earlier this morning that this report is the culmination of 6 months of research, collaboration, hours of white boarding, phone calls, and skype calls in the early morning and on weekends working with an ecosystem of 42 partners. The document identifies 18 use cases for Social ...
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 A few things came together for me this week around the Cloud term. I spent time with one of my best customers discussing online accounting, what we should do to improve t he product we represent in the UK, and how we should position to beat the incumbent in the small business market, Sage. But the first thing that Philip Woodgate told us was how useful the Cloud term is for the clients and business people he deals with. These are business from small, to medium to International where he struggled explaining SaaS 3 or 4 years ago when he started promoting the concept. He thinks the Cloud term makes it much easier to "get" for the average business. The next thing was this post on ReadWriteCloud with Wordpress.com founder Mat Mullenweg suggesting the Cloud is marketing speak. Mat was explaining how a recent outage in their service occurred. Alex William's wrote in the article: "The cloud gets blamed for almost any online outage these days. It used to be that we'd just say the service went down and there was a failure at the host or the data center. Sure enough, the Wordpress.com outage is not a cloud disaster. Instead, .. ...
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I'm a Twitter fan from the early days (which is only about 3 years - streuth!). For me it's a key source of trusted information, a communication mechanism, and an important way for me to extend my various, overlapping networks of interest ( amongst several other things). In recent weeks I've seen tweets from people worrying about those that have " social media guru" in their Twitter bio (there are a lot of them about). The other morning I was followed by someone new. A great tool called Topify sends me an email with their profile, details of how many people they follow and the number who follow them, their bio, links and their last few tweets so that you can make a quick decision on who they are and whether you want to follow back. This guy had " thought leader" in his bio. I immediately wondered to the twitterverse whether this was as bad or worse than having the guru thing in your bio. Here's a selection of some of the responses from the wonderful people who follow me: 
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 Last Thursday in Durham FutureStory launched as part of the North East Economic Forum. I've already blogged about why I've got involved in this joint initiative between Lucy Parker's Talent and Enterprise Taskforce and the Department for Business Innovation and Skills (BIS). The BIS press release on the day started like this: "Business leaders in the North East today (on Feb 18) urged young people to proactively research local industries so they can rise to the challenge of getting a job in tomorrow’s global economy. In return they pledged to help local schools and colleges play an active role in plotting the North East’s economic future."
The NEEF annual conference was a fitting forum for promoting this new initiative. Adam Boulton of Sky News introduced a series of speakers focusing on the regeneration of the region which has moved from its industrial heritage of mining and steel to housing the UK's largest car exporter, the National Centre for Excellence in Plastics, and a whole host of low carbon initiatives. During the day we heard about huge off shore wind farms, a national training centre for Green Collar Workers that is in the process ...
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